This recent Yahoo! news item tells the story of Alecia Dantico, a professional Tweeter who is part of a growing trend of large corporations hiring talent to send out messages on that social network.
Like most creative endeavors, this could be a very smart thing or a small distraction: the results depend upon strategy and even more importantly, execution.
Strategically, this initiative needs a clear purpose and goals: brandbuilding? Outreach for direct consumer connection? A modern update of the old consumer complaint department? Whatever the reason, this and any marketing endeavor needs to have a clearly-defined goal, otherwise it’s simply another distracting tactic.
The execution must then work to execute this strategy, mindful of the strengths and weaknesses of the platform. For Twitter, one of those strengths is the immediacy and topicality of a group conversation; the best tweets are often helpful and always engaging. Comedy, surprise, discovery; the best Twitter feeds deliver those on a dependably regular basis. In other words, if the brand personality doesn’t engage or worse, if corporate concerns over legal and control issues sanitize and stifle the 140 character executions, the result more likely will be a “Bland Personality.”
Which is why this platform provides the perfect retirement opportunity for copywriters. Office location, 9-5, assignment flowcharts: none of these agency realities matter in the world of corporate micro-blogging. All that matters is the need to create relevant engagement that serves a strategy. Our creative enterprise has a well-earned reputation for eating it’s young; here at last could be a way to make good with an ongoing freelance gig that serves both brands and creatives.
It also serves the newer offerings of Word-of-Mouth PR agencies, most of whom already follow this sort of ‘create a strategy and outsource the execution’ type of model.
It doesn’t however, serve large agency structures. Considering this article in relation to yesterday’s post which took Weber Shandwick’s Chris Perry to task for laying the blame for Social Media’s slow development as a brand platform squarely at the feet of traditional agencies, perhaps I should rethink. Particularly after posting yesterday’s blog to LinkedIn’s AdPro group to solicit other points of view and receiving some very thoughtful responses.
Corporations need results from their tactics. They also need something else: responsibility from their marketing partners. The cost structure of a traditional agency makes this kind of initiative rather challenging from a creative execution standpoint. However, the benefits of insuring an integrated strategy and established results expectations make this an easily-adopted new tactic…
Once you outsource to a few talented, interesting, retired writers.